Exploring medieval field systems in local landscape

Reading the landscape around your parish

Most people look at a field and see grass. A local historian looks at the same field and sees a plough team turning at the headland six hundred years ago. The medieval farming landscape of Britain is not buried treasure; it is lying openly across the countryside, waiting to be read. The open-field system that dominated much of lowland England, and the runrig and infield–outfield arrangements of Scotland, Wales and the uplands, left marks that survive in pasture, in hedges and, above all, in the names on old maps. If you want to understand how your parish was worked, you need three things: a pair of boots, a tithe map, and patience.

Ridge and furrow: the fossilised ploughing

The most striking survival is ridge and furrow. It looks like corrugated ground: broad rounded ridges separated by shallow furrows, often five to nine metres from one ridge crest to the next. Where it is well preserved you may notice that the ends of the ridges curve in a shallow S-shape. That curve is the signature of a heavy plough team — perhaps eight oxen and a ploughman — turning at the end of the strip, throwing the soil to the right as they came about.

Ridge and furrow survives best in old permanent pasture on heavy clay, land too awkward or too wet to have been ploughed up by steam engines or modern machinery. Look in winter, with low afternoon sunlight raking across the ground; the shadows reveal what a summer view hides. Churchyards, parkland and the strips beside a footpath are good places to start. If you spot earthworks that look like house platforms, or a hollow way running between the ridges, you may be standing in a shrunken or deserted village.

Hedgerows and boundaries

Ancient hedgerows are the other great giveaway. A boundary hedge is not a single species; it is a community. Hawthorn usually dominates, but older hedges carry field maple, hazel, blackthorn, dogwood, spindle, crab apple and, in the south and Midlands, wild service tree. A useful rough guide is that a thirty-metre stretch containing roughly one woody species for every hundred years of age will date the hedge approximately. It is only a rule of thumb, but it will separate a Victorian enclosure hedge from one that was already old when Elizabeth I came to the throne.

Look at how the hedge sits in the landscape. Is it on a bank with a ditch alongside? Does it run dead straight, or does it wander across a field in a curve that makes no sense for a tractor? Curving boundaries often trace the edge of a medieval open field, the line of a stream, or an old headland where the plough was lifted. Parish boundaries are worth plotting on a map in coloured pencil; they frequently follow watercourses, tracks and hedges far older than the churches they enclose.

Field names and the documentary trail

Names are the cheapest evidence you will ever find. Tithe maps and apportionments, drawn up after the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836, list every field in the parish with its name, owner, occupier and acreage. Enclosure awards and maps, estate surveys and manorial records reach back further. Between them they give you a vocabulary of the open fields.

• Furlong, shot, stitch or land — a block of strips in the open field, roughly the length a plough team could manage before resting.
• Selion — a single strip, often a furlong long and a perch or two wide.
• Butt, gore, goar or wedge — awkward tapering strips left where furlongs met at an angle.
• Dole, dolemead or lammas land — meadow or pasture shared in common, often opened for grazing after haymaking.
• Pightle, croft, toft or close — small paddocks by the houses, kept when the open fields were reorganised.
• Ings, carr, moor or waste — wet or rough ground on the edge of cultivation.

Do not expect neat answers. A field called "Long Furlong" in 1840 may have been enclosed by agreement in 1600 and ploughed flat by 1800. Names persist long after the farming they describe has gone, which is precisely why they are so useful.

Putting it together on the ground

Start with the tithe map for your parish, held at the county record office or the local studies library. Copy the map, then write the apportionment field names onto it in pencil. Add the enclosure award, if there is one, and the earliest estate map you can find. Now walk the public footpaths and look for the earthworks, hedges and names you have mapped. Take photographs, note grid references and record what you see in a notebook with the date and weather — low sun and bare ground are your best allies.

Be respectful. Most of this land is private and ridge and furrow is fragile; repeated footfall will flatten it within a season. Do not cross fences or take vehicles onto fields. If you want to dig, join your county archaeological society, or check with the historic environment record before you lift a trowel. But for reading the landscape, all you really need is a keen eye and the willingness to look at a field twice — once in August, and once in January, when the sun is low.